Sebastian Stan is bald, like the glossy undercarriage of a baby seal. Let’s just get that out of the way. “I’m on a journey with it,” he explains. “I’ve stopped asking what the destination is.” He first shaved his hair off for Fjord, the film he’s promoting today, then was asked to keep it shorn for a sequel to The Batman, which he’s shooting as we speak. He’s playing Two-Face, or serial killer Victor Zsasz, or a secret third thing we don’t know about yet. “It’s been a very freeing experience, I have to say.”
Next to Stan is his Norwegian co-star Renate Reinsve, of The Worst Person in the World and Sentimental Value, but not of any periods of self-imposed baldness herself. “I did have a life crisis once, though, where I cut my hair like this short,” she says, creating a tiny pocket of air between her thumb and forefinger. “And that was a week before I was asked to do Worst Person, so they had to fit me for a wig.”
“That was a wig?” Stan interjects, shocked. “It looked so real!”
Movie magic, baby. Similarly magical is how Fjord – which won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival – turns two of the acting world’s most beautiful people into buttoned-up Evangelical Christians with a seemingly infinite supply of your grandmother’s knitwear. Fjordfilmmaker Cristian Mungiu has said that Stan, at least, is typically “too handsome” for his kind of cinema. So here Stan is also given crooked prosthetic teeth and a big pair of glasses à la the early, pre-makeover stages of She’s All That. It works like gangbusters, ensuring Fjord is more on the “earning an Oscar nod for playing Donald Trump in The Apprentice” end of the Sebastian Stan pretty-boy spectrum, as opposed to getting primped and ripped for all those Marvel movies he’s in.
People online are already labelling the movie and they haven’t even f***ing seen it. It’s so ridiculous and dumb and sad, like self-cannibalising before the movie’s even got there
Fjord is loosely inspired by the story of Ruth and Marius Bodnariu, a Romanian-Norwegian couple whose children were taken into care in Norway in 2015 after allegations were made that they had hit their offspring. They were also investigated over claims of practising religious indoctrination. After a highly public seven-month investigation, the Bodnariu’s children were returned to them, and the family subsequently moved back to Romania. But the case became an international scandal in the process, with conservative politicians and Christian groups claiming – due to Norway’s generally secular relationship to faith, its progressively minded view of how to raise children, and the country’s liberal politics overall – that the Bodnarius had been targeted because of their faith.
Fjord lifts some of the Bodnariu story, as well as those of other immigrant families in Norway investigated for alleged infractions, but also stubbornly refuses to pick a side. The Norwegians often come off as hypervigilant scolds unwilling to see any grey areas, but the Gheorghius – as played by Stan and Reinsve – are also severe, puritanical and punitive, with their children caught in the crossfire of two very different cultures.
“Clearly, the way this family is raising their kids is impacting them in ways they haven’t yet registered,” Stan says. “The movie asks you to question things as a parent – am I raising my child for them, or am I raising my child to have them become who I want them to be? It’s not pro-God, or pro-discipline. It’s much more complicated than that.”
Stan brought his own background to the role: he was born and raised in Constanța, Romania, later moving to Vienna at the age of eight, then New York at the age of 12. “Coming from that country and having had that traditional upbringing – religious or not – I understood very clearly what was going on,” he says. “They are old-school, patriarchal, and very specific in their lanes. And many people don’t understand that Eastern European upbringing.”
He thinks it requires an open mind to acknowledge that both the Norwegians and the Romanians have their pluses and minuses when it comes to parenting, but that it’s trickier now for people to have empathy. “We’re all so defensive of our sides, right?” he says. “People feel attacked and put into a defensive position constantly, therefore we’re losing our ability to self-criticise, or acknowledge our own faults. It’s like radicalisation being met with radicalisation.”
The ambiguity of Fjord, though, has occasionally been to its detriment. Early reactions out of Cannes saw it dubbed a “MAGA movie” by some on X, a (deeply reactionary) stance only buffered by Mingiu’s decision to pose for photographs at the festival with the Romanian politician Titus Corlățean, who has widely condemned European child protection systems. (Mungiu, for his part, has declined to express his own political leanings, and denied claims that his film leans conservative – but he has described Fjord as a lesson in needing to reject both “right-wing and left-wing fundamentalism”.) Did Stan and Reinsve anticipate the backlash to the movie?
“When we were making it? Absolutely not,” Stan says, definitively.
“Not to this extent,” Reinsve adds. “We knew we were a part of something that wasn’t showing people how to feel or think. And we knew people would get riled up by it. So much of the time, movies tell you how to feel. But this movie really pulls away from any manipulation, and wants to be as objective as possible so the audience can make up their own minds. I love it when that happens, but for some people that can be very provocative.”
Stan adds that he believes it’s a specifically American response to the film, noting that Fjord hasn’t received a similar backlash in Norway. “[American] people online are already labelling the movie and they haven’t even f***ing seen it,” he says. “It’s so ridiculous and dumb and sad, like self-cannibalising before the movie’s even got there.”
Reinsve thinks the issue is far broader than left or right – when the world is in as bad a state as it is, people grow isolated, which makes them double down on their belief systems. “When your basic needs are met, you have space and room for empathy to develop, and can look at other people’s perspectives,” she says. “But when you are living in fear, and your basic needs aren’t met, you can’t afford to look at the other perspective.”
Stan and Reinsve first met in 2022, while working on the darkly funny psycho-thriller A Different Man. Stan played a man who undergoes experimental surgery to rid him of his genetic condition, neurofibromatosis, and finds it makes no difference to his confidence, while Reinsve was a ruthless playwright putting his life story on stage. “I think we’re both people who trust people slowly,” Stan adds. “We became better friends after.”
“But it was nice to have this background between us for Fjord,” Reinsve says, “where we had last worked together on this very New York indie film where you talk fast and get a little eccentric with it when you act. Because this story is just so dark. We needed to be able to have fun after a day on set.”
If there’s a shared bond between Stan and Reinsve, it’s their allergy to professional convention. Stan’s career has more or less become the platonic ideal for someone contractually obligated to make at least one Marvel movie a year. While lining his coffers with Thunderbolts or the forthcoming Avengers: Doomsday, he’s taken bolder, riskier swings with the likes of The Apprentice or Argyris Papadimitropoulos’s off-beat romance Monday, which saw him riding a moped through the streets of Athens stark naked. Reinsve, meanwhile, has used the international fame she accumulated from The Worst Person in the World to strike an enviable balance between intense Nordic dramas and very commercial English-language hits.
“Can we talk for a second about you being in one of the biggest movies of the year?” Stan asks her. The movie in question being Backrooms, the surprise horror blockbuster about a man (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his therapist (Reinsve) venturing into a parallel dimension, which grossed more than $400m on a budget of $10m – and all under the direction of, oof, a 20-year-old filmmaker named Kane Parsons.
“I planned it all,” Reinsve deadpans. “But no, it was insane. I assumed it was just this weird indie movie, so to have it blow up like that was crazy. And I love the way Kane thinks. I think he’s a little genius.” She corrects herself. “Not little as in young! Just, like, new.”
There’s a version of Stan’s career, meanwhile, in which he could theoretically take the easy route every chance he gets. Why doesn’t he? “I have a suspicion of comfort,” he laughs. “The idea of settling into this way of showing up to set at a comfortable hour, getting a little tan or whatever…” He trails off. “I’ve seen how easy it is in this business to get used to a certain way of doing things and then not want to get out of it. I’ve watched people do that. I just don’t want to get trapped.”
‘Fjord’ is in cinemas from 13 November
